student fees

The California Public Education Commission is studying student fee structures for higher education, specifically the CSU and the UC. Their press release details the dramatic rise in student fees at the CSU over the last few years - a time period when the CSU Board of Trustees has voted repeatedly to raise the fees rather than press the legislature or the public at large for full funding. CPEC points out that these shifts in costs represent a historic withdrawal of the State's commitment to broad access to public funded higher education.

I have thought for a few years now that during my young lifetime I have been a witness to a remarkable undermining of public institutions of all sorts. I can't immediately account for it. Critical social theorists I've read have tended to discuss it in terms of the crisis in capitalism at the beginning of the information age. Their analyses have ranged from powerful elites taking cynical advantage of shifting relations of production and imposing the costs of their doing business on the society at large, to failure of the will of governments to maintain social programs under the threat of capital expatriation. Habermas explains, usefully, that social welfare and educational policies serve to legitimate capitalist economic policies, basically by salving the wounds and ameliorating the pathologies arising from the contradictions of capitalism. In his discussion in Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas notes in passing that the devolution of social welfare would undermine the main political legitimation of capital. But he doesn't, to my way of thinking, say enough about what happens next.

Apparently, what happens next is that those with power keep shifting burdens onto those without power, and those without power keep taking it.